Resources

Community knowledge is the strongest tool we have, and we must learn how to both respect and harness it. When we seek to make change in the world, we must ask ourselves: Who might know what needs to happen even better than I do?

For me, acknowledging what I cannot see lies at the heart of community building. It helps me feel connected to the humanity of people in my circles and in the broader world, as ultimately the invisible heaviness of experience is one of the things that I know to be true of being human.

We have been counting the days since October 7, counting the unbearable number of lost lives, counting the number of hostages, counting the number of people who became refugees in their own land. We count and we count and we count. And we tell a story. Each and every one of us.

[Unders stress,] we are often functioning far from our cores, where we can access our unique strengths and talents, offer our best selves, and hear – and perhaps even seek – other voices.

We are returning from the mountain to the plains; from our highest ideals to the practicalities of daily living; from the most fundamental expression of holiness to where we are now.

How we love our neighbor is by fighting for a society in which we would be glad to live no matter how little privilege we had.

This resource offers guidance for educators on where to start and some factors to consider. It is not a program in a box but rather an approach to planning whatever program your community needs.

We are born in the image of God, but we must accept that this God-given status exists only within the framework of human enforcement.

This is the work before us this Pesach. We must abandon our worship of the false idol of correctness. We have to start with what we know. We know that all people need peace to survive. We know the liberation of Israelis is bound up with the liberation of Palestinians and vice versa. We know being traumatized is not a way to live. We also know that clinging to the crumbs of winning an argument only takes us further away from peace.

The words we speak may soothe our spiritual and emotional wounds when spoken in kindness, but speech has the potential to “sicken” us, as individuals and as a society when spoken in malice.